Trauma-informed system change

The three founding New System Alliance partners got together to share learning about creating place-based change. We generated ideas around these three themes:

• Recognising that trauma-informed practice is not just about the traumas which affect individuals or families, but recognises the traumas inflicted up on whole communities, often across generations
• Generating learning is a core function of any organisation or place which is seriously engaged with systems-change
• The transfer of power is central to any system change.

Platfform’s roots are in mental health support work, but it now sees community development work as being equally important to creating mental health. As well as considering Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) as sources of trauma, Platfform recognises that it will often work with communities experiencing Adverse Community Experiences. These could be large single events like the loss of an industry like mining on which a whole community was reliant, or a series of events, such the grinding impact of racism on a black community. Some communities experience both, such as the Grenfell disaster which was the culmination of decades of exclusion and neglect of a diverse community. These Adverse Community Experiences in turn impact upon the capacity of individuals and families to respond to more personal adversity. So all genuinely trauma-informed mental health work must see people through an inequalities lens or risk ignoring not only the reality of their trauma, but also the potential for organisations to participate in inequalities which form an ongoing source of that trauma.

Homeless Network Scotland is working with Aberdeen Foyer on the question, How do we improve outcomes for young people in the Northfield community of Aberdeen? This project, part of Homeless Network Scotland’s No Wrong Door approach to building more responsive and seamless services with people and communities who experience siloed and fractured services, brings together services, a school and young people to generate learning and new forums for identifying change.

Like Mayday Trust, both organisations see this work as generating learning which can be fed back into creating system change elsewhere. The learning always touches on where power lies and how decision-making can be shifted to the people and communities who are impacted by services and systems which are still designed with too little input from them. Mayday’s new place-based approach to coproducing healthier service systems is based on practical approaches to equipping the most excluded people with the power and resources to try something different to the traditional offers which haven’t worked for them.

Thanks to Platfform and Homeless Network Scotland for sharing their wisdom. Full story here: https://newsystemalliance.org/2023/09/05/place-based-working-a-trauma-informed-approach/